


Can I Have Your Autograph?

by Dame_Lazarus



Category: Barry (TV 2018), Killing Eve (TV 2018)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Ceiling ex machina, Crack Treated Seriously, Crossover, F/F, Gen, Just silliness really, One Shot, Villanelle on a plane, Villanelle slightly baked
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-03
Updated: 2020-05-03
Packaged: 2021-03-02 05:20:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,113
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23989519
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dame_Lazarus/pseuds/Dame_Lazarus
Summary: When the Twelve send their most problematic agents to take each other out, they get a bit more than they bargained for.
Relationships: Barry Berkman & NoHo Hank, Eve Polastri/Villanelle | Oksana Astankova, Villanelle & Noho Hank
Comments: 6
Kudos: 25





	Can I Have Your Autograph?

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is brought to you by: the Great Pause of 2020. There is no other excuse. 
> 
> This fic takes place after season 2 of Barry and episode 3.03 of Killing Eve.

Villanelle thrusts her arm out into the aisle, stopping the stewardess in her tracks at the row behind her. The woman is probably shocked that this passenger anticipated her so easily; she doesn’t know that this one has been trained to hear even the softest footfalls in the loudest room.

She waves her empty champagne flute up and down in midair, perfectly in line with the path of the stewardess’s gaze. “I need a refill,” she announces. She has decided that for this job she will sound throaty and decadent, like a woman in an old black-and-white movie who holds her cigarette on the end of one of those wand things.

“Of-of course,” the woman stammers. Villanelle smiles as she hears her spin on her heel and stamp back toward the little curtained galley at the back of the plane. _She’s so pissed off_ , she thinks, spinning the glass by its stem.

Real glass. A perk of first class. No flimsy squat disposable cups like the normal people have to use. The champagne wasn’t very good, but it would have tasted worse in coach class plastic.

She stretches her legs out in front of her to wait. This flight has sleeping pods in neat little rows for first class, which make her feel like she’s on a spaceship. If she rests her feet on the top edge of the far end, and tips her head back toward the cushion of other, so she’s almost upside down, she can almost pretend that she’s in a room with high walls that no one can see over.

Footsteps approach again and Villanelle proffers her glass. The stewardess doesn’t speak as the champagne glugs out.

She looks up at the woman. If she didn’t have to wear that stupid headband and ugly black flats, she’d probably be less grumpy. “How much longer?” she asks.

“Until we land? About four hours.” She smiles tightly. “Please ring the bell if you need anything else.”

Villanelle pushes the button immediately. “Can I have one of those strawberries for my drink, like with the first one?”

The woman’s smile is now more a grimace, but she turns sharply back toward the other end of the plane once more. Villanelle sips the champagne, burying her giggles into the little bubbles that tickle her upper lip.

Four hours. God, America is so far away.

It didn’t seem so far away when it first came up. Back in London, Konstantin had shaken her awake at an ungodly hour and said he had an assignment for her. She had taken over his bed for a few days. It was nice to be near someone familiar, with her mind racing the way it was after she found Eve on that bus.

“Go away,” she told him. “My assignments come from Dasha now.”

He pushed a postcard in her face. Green hills and tiny white letters. H-O-L-L-Y-W-O-O-D. She grabbed it and flipped it to the back. _I wouldn’t have made it here without you, my favorite teacher!_

“This is from Dasha,” he said. If not for the message, typical for smug Dasha, she would not have believed him. “This is a very important mission. A step up. They need your help with an agent who has gone rogue.”

“And I have to explain to him how to follow rules?” She rolled her eyes.

Konstantin grinned. “No. You stop him from being rogue.”

Villanelle had grinned back and jumped to her feet. She loved to stop people. There were so many ways to make them go still.

The man she is supposed to kill looks very boring. Bony face. Pasty. Brown eyes and hair. He’s an actor, in addition to working for the Twelve, but only in one play that ran one night. His file has a review of it; one inch of text about how he and some girl named Sally performed “with emotions.” What a sad little compliment. Los Angeles was probably full of men like him—actors who sucked at acting. She hoped he wasn’t thinking of giving up his job for the Twelve to be so predictable. And poor. But Americans are stupid. (Eve is only half-American. She doesn’t count.)

When the plane finally lands, approximately nine thousand hours after taking off in London, she shrugs into a long black trench coat that she had tucked into the overhead bin. It’s soft leather, with a smell that makes her feel taller. She shakes her hair down from its loose bun into waves over her shoulder and slides on a pair of dark sunglasses. If the plane wasn’t so awfully lit with bright white fluorescents, she would have stumbled like an idiot into the airport. Instead she strides out languidly, wheeling her gleaming carry-on suitcase behind her.

She wears all soft fabrics, all black. Her tired eyes hide safely behind the dark glasses. The woman she is for this job is sophisticated and aloof. Villanelle wonders if this is how it feels to be famous. Untouchable, needing no one. Being so good at being yourself that you know you can get whatever you want.

Against her better judgement, she stops to stand in a line for an overpriced espresso. The sign says it is from Italy to fool the Americans. She just needs to make sure she doesn’t fall asleep until it’s dark out. Changing time zones is a real bitch.

Someone pulls on the edge of her jacket. She looks down; it’s a little girl with frizzy dark hair in two buns on top of her head, like Mickey Mouse.

“Are you a celebrity?” the mouse girl asks her.

“Yes, my darling.” The voice for the woman she is here rolls around in her mouth like a ripe cherry. “I am renowned around the world for my excellent work.”

The girl’s eyes are wide. She holds up a little notebook, open to a fresh page. “Can I have your autograph?”

* * *

  
“Carolyn is fine,” the man says as soon as Eve walks out into the restaurant’s courtyard. She won’t apologize for the undoubtably terrified look on her face. Just a week prior someone had shot through Carolyn’s window and just missed sending a bullet through her skull.

Of course, she knew that the graze was intentional: meant to distract her while the gunman took out the real target. Smart work. Eve expected nothing less.

“If she’s fine, Mo, then why are you here?” He looks a little deflated at that. Why are you worrying about your ego at a time like this? Eve thinks. The work she’s doing with Eve is the only thing keeping Carolyn going after Kenny died. She’d be here herself. Unless—

“Carolyn doesn’t know you’re here,” Eve guesses. Mo nods.

Eve gestures for him to sit at one of the little wooden tables for outdoor dining. He settles back a little nervously in one of the rickety chairs. They got them in bulk ahead of the summer season and the cheap metal is not inspiring confidence.

Mo pulls a folder out of his messenger bag and slides it across the table.

Inside: two photographs. A pale man, with brown hair and brown eyes that are both serious and innocent at once. And the other— _her_.

She looks up at Mo, who is just staring at her, lips pressed together. “Some agents intercepted this. We think it’s two hits. One, on this dude, an American. Former soldier, now trying to be an actor in Los Angeles. The other, well. You know her.”

“This former soldier,” Eve asks, though she is still gazing down into the woman’s eyes. “What’s his deal?”

Mo shrugs. “There’s very little on him. Except—a few months back he got arrested for murder. The LAPD dropped the charges; seems the real culprit was a local Chechen crime syndicate. But if I had to guess...”

“An assassin,” Eve says. The lack of information is the tell. “Like her.”

He nods.

“So which one do you think is the real target? Even if it’s her, he’ll be the one who winds up dead.”

“You sound very sure.”

“She’s very good.”

“Either way, the last time the Twelve sent her off to kill someone, it was the very person to whom we needed to speak.”

She rises. “I’ll see what I can do.”

Mo looks surprised; he shouldn’t. He should know that this was what she would do. Carolyn wouldn’t have involved her at all, now that she had her cooperation.

Within two hours, Eve has a maxed-out credit card and a plane ticket to Los Angeles. _This is mission critical_ , she tells herself. We can’t let the Twelve kill off all our potential sources.

She’s doing this for Kenny. No other reason.

* * *

  
_This Barry lives a sad life_ , Villanelle thinks, after breaking in to his apartment. The apartment building looks to only recently been made one. On the outside, fading blue words drawn in chipped paint on the building’s exterior pronounce it as a bread factory. Inside, he has a metal door and a row of little square windows and white walls with nothing on them. His couch is brown. His kitchen table is made of green plastic and has a hole in the middle meant to hold a patio umbrella. It is a table meant for outside. And there isn’t even a TV. 

More like a bread _crumbs_ factory. If she wasn’t sent here to kill him, she would advise him on how to get the Twelve to give him better accommodations. He probably shows up to every kill wearing a dark hoodie, shoots the mark in the head, and then runs away. Every kill is probably the same. He has the face of someone with no imagination. He certainly has the apartment of one.

Behind her, someone turns the key in the lock. She spins and points the gun. Time to die, Breadcrumbs Barry.

The person at the door is not Barry. It is a strange short man, also pale, but with no hair. He’s wearing a pink polo shirt and white shorts, and at the sight of her, he screams and drops the green canvas bag in his hand to the ground.

“Don’t shoot! These pants are brand new and they are very expensive.”

She gestures with the gun for him to close the door and come inside. “Who are you? Barry’s boyfriend?”

“Me? And Barry? No, no. He and I are not—you know. He is my best friend. Just best friend Barry. I bring him some groceries, sometimes, to help out. He’s going through some things.”

“That’s how it starts,” Villanelle warns. What a poor clueless man. He doesn’t even know he has a boyfriend.

“Well, who exactly are you? Typical Russian, barging in and ordering people around even though you don’t belong.” He crosses his arms and leans back agains the door. “You can’t scare me. Ever since I was boy in Chechnya they taught me how to fight Russians. I know exactly how to take you and your stunning Fall 2019 Yves St. Laurent jacket down.”

Villanelle has him pinned against the door, gun under his chin, in less than three seconds. “You think I would wear last year’s jacket? This is Fall 2020. Also, I have a gun. Your shorts are too tight to fit one in. You will not win.”

“Ok! You want to talk to Barry?” he rasps. “I can call him. If you do not shoot me.”

She smiles and steps back, lowering her gun. He gasps out and takes a series of very dramatic breaths, rubbing his throat. She rolls her eyes. She did not even hold him that hard.

“Why don’t you have any eyebrows?” she asks as he recovers.

His face crumples into a hilarious frown. “I have a condition, ok? Alopecia, have you heard of it? It’s very sensitive for me.”

Villanelle holds up her hands. “Ok! Sorry. Don’t go crying about it. Call your boyfriend and let’s get this over with.”

 _Why can’t these jobs be simple_ , she thinks. She is really getting sick of ending up with more than one body.

* * *

  
Increasingly of late, Eve finds herself looking around and wondering, _how the fuck did I end up here?_ She has this very thought standing on Van Alstyne Avenue in the blazing sun, watching the Los Angeles traffic snake by a string of heavily curtained bars with no signs. Her eye passes over them to the beacon of hope on the corner. The thing she was looking for. The thing telling her she was in the right place.

Yoshinoya Los Angeles, #32. The one located just before the small strip called Little Chechnya begins.

Ah, America.

Eve doesn’t go into the Yoshinoya; she’s not here for Japanese fast food, though the Yelp reviews did say that the beef bowl was pretty tasty. At the turn of the crosswalk signal, she heads over to the first curtained bar. Time to meet some Chechens.

Her path here has been equally strange as the destination. It started with some light googling upon arrival to her LAX airport hotel. Barry Block, the stage name for Barry Berkman, the assassin and also target, did a one-night weird black-box ensemble thing with his acting class. A tiny arts weekly mentions him and one other actor by name in their tepid review—a woman named Sally Reed.

Sally had some actual IMDB credits to her name; Eve thought she even recognized the episode of the trashy space opera where she apparently played an alien mom last year. But from Facebook, it didn’t look like Sally’s booking as much work as she used to. _Come see me tonight 7-midnight at The Shady Lady!_ she posted, with two martini emojis.

Sally was ultimately not too helpful at the Shady Lady. Eve showed up at seven o’clock, when there were barely any customers; she bought a beer and even remembered to tip her. Sally was a pretty girl, and charming—blond hair, blue eyes, easy smile. But she dropped the charm immediately when Eve asked about Barry.

“I’m an old friend from high school,” she explained. “I’m hoping to get back in touch now that I’m on the area. I saw you did a play with him—would you be able to give me his number?”

She scoffed at that. “Barry and I aren’t in touch. He unfriended me on Facebook! We had—“ and here she wiped her eye, though Eve couldn’t see if a tear was there or not—“creative differences.”

She took the tip from the bar and shoved it into her pocket. “Excuse me. I need to change the keg,” she said, sniffling.

Strike one. However, it wasn’t all _bad_ bad. Sally had given her a clue: Facebook.

Barry Block had a pretty sad Facebook profile. Up until a few months ago, he shared Sally’s posts with wild abandon. Never posted anything of his own. He had thirteen Facebook friends, all of whom seemed to be members of his same acting class, taught by some scammer named Gene Coustineau. If he wasn’t trying to kill _her_ , Eve would have felt the urge to give him a hug.

Barry Block didn’t have a lot of history on Facebook for Eve to peruse. The account must have been only a year or two old. A mark of a man who had been successfully been no one until he got tired of it. Eve tried to picture _her_ deciding to stop being no one. She’d post every four seconds on her new identity’s social media accounts. Instagram, though. She was too classy for Facebook.

The final clue came out of nowhere in the middle of this reverie. Halfway down Barry’s timeline, a series of posts have only one like, from someone who wasn’t one of Barry’s friends. Noho Hunk, their name was. And amusingly, their profile had nothing, except a like for a single page: Yoshinoya Los Angeles, #32.

Weird location next to all those bars in Little Chechnya. Great beef bowls though! the first review and only review on Yelp said.

Chechens. Like the ones who took the fall for that murder for Barry. Was he working for the Chechens? The Twelve must not have liked that—their ranks were full of Russians. Or maybe this was all a frame-up job orchestrated by the Twelve. Either way, Eve has found her dots and she was connecting them.

And the final dot—she’d have to find it in Little Chechnya.

She parts heavy maroon velvet curtains at the first bar, one over from the Yoshinoya, and walks inside. The room is lit by a single gleaming chandelier in the middle of the ceiling and the air is so heavy with smoke that Eve has to fight the urge to cough. Everyone stops talking to look at her; at least fifteen hairy men in various styles of track suits staring her down.

She walks to the bar and sits down at a stool uneasily. The dark-haired bartender keeps drying the pint glass in her hand, staring, and doesn’t come to take her order. To Eve’s left, a very fat and very unfortunately balding man in an electric blue track suit presses close.

“Who are you?” he asks, pointing at her with his cigar, eyes narrow.

“Soon Yi,” Eve says. It’s the first thing that pops into her mind. “I’m looking for someone. Maybe you could help? His name is...” She takes a deep breath. “...Noho Hunk?”

All the track-suited Chechens laugh.

“Hank! Calling himself Hunk now?” the man pressed close to her says. He pressed even closer and Eve tries not to flinch. “He is pretty useless, though he did kill that Burmese lady for us. The Koreans want him for something?”

“Oh yes,” Eve says, “we Koreans really do. Could you give me his phone number? It’s very urgent.”

* * *

  
Breadcrumbs Barry’s hairless boyfriend isn’t so bad, Villanelle muses. He gave her a glass of organic mango juice and a puff of his medical marijuana while they waited on the brown couch for her mark to show up. Maybe she would let him live after she killed Barry. His name is Hank! What a strange little Chechen.

“You have great skin,” he says, slurping some kombucha through a metal straw. “What is your secret?”

Villanelle shrugs and takes another drag of the joint. “Good genes. And Russian mud masks.”

He straightens up. “Oh-em-gee, Villanelle. Have you tried the Dead Sea blue clay mask? I brought some for Barry but you can tell he hasn’t been using it.”

He runs off to the bathroom and Villanelle draws in her third puff. It probably isn’t even from the Dead Sea. More marketing to fool dumb Americans.

Still, she lets Hank rub it on her face. When the clay hits warm skin it turns bright blue.

“You want me to do yours next?” she asks, tiling her head. Hank grins, and she sloughs a huge gob of clay mask out of the jar onto his cheek.

She’s spreading it around over the bridge of his nose when his phone rings. The ringtone is The Beach Boys. _Wouldn’t it be nice if we were older?_

He holds it to his ear. “Hello, Hank speaking!” he chirps.

A pause. “You are looking for Barry? Everyone is looking for Barry, Eve Polastri. I left him a message but I don’t know—“

Villanelle grabs the phone from his hand. “Hello Eve,” she purrs. “Did you get my present?”

Eve does not respond. Villanelle hears her breathing, though, and she smiles.

“Listen,” Eve says finally. “Barry—“

“Yes, an assassin for the Twelve. I am here to kill him.”

“Of course you are. Villanelle, listen: there’s a strong possibility that he’s been hired to kill you.”

Villanelle looks over at Hank, who is evening out his own mud mask. Sneaky, sneaky.

“Eve, did you come to LA to save me?” she asks, grinning wider.

No response.

“You did! Eve, you know I don’t need saving. You should see this Barry’s apartment. It’s the saddest thing I have ever seen. I am going to kick his ass so hard.”

“You?” Hank says, frowning. “You are not as strong as Barry. I think he will kick your ass.” She rolls her eyes.

“Go home, Eve,” she says, smiling into the phone. She won’t go, of course. “Goodbye!”

She hangs up the phone and passes it to Hank.

“Who was that?” he asks, taking the phone with his non-blue-clay hand.

“Eve,” she says. “She was mine. I shot her.”

He laughs nervously.

“Then she beat me up on a bus and we kissed.”

He shakes his head. “Girl, that is complicated.”

“It is.” Now it is her turn to frown. “Worse than Chechnya.”

Suddenly the lock in the door turns again. Hank is on his feet in an instant. A man steps through the door. It’s him: Breadcrumbs Barry. Even pastier in person, wearing a plain red t-shirt. You do not wear red with that complexion. Well, ideally, you do not have that complexion at all.

“Oh, hi, Barry! Fancy seeing you here,” Hank says nervously.

“I live here, Hank,” Barry says, closing the door behind him. You live in California, you dumbass. Go to a beach! Get some color in your lifeless face!

“Right! Silly Hank; you’re being so rude. Can I introduce you to my friend? This is Villanelle. She’s a badass lady assassin! She came to kill you, but then her girlfriend called, and said you, Barry, were actually supposed to be killing her, but I think that we can talk this all out, have an open dialogue, you know—“

Villanelle interrupts. “What did you do to piss off the Twelve?”

Barry jumps. He really didn’t see her there, even with a blue face. “What’s the Twelve?” he asks.

“The Twelve! Our boss!”

“I don’t have a boss. I don’t work for anyone. I work for myself.”

Villanelle nods. “I did that once. Very boring. Lots of angry wives and family troubles. You should have quit the Twelve first, though. That’s why they asked me to kill you.”

She pulls out her gun. The little hairless Chechen gasps; he is stupid if he really didn’t think she had a gun ready the whole time.

“My question is, then,” she asks, “who hired you to kill me, Barry?”

He gapes at her. Then recognition hits his face. Under all the blue clay, he notices who he’s dealing with. He got a photograph, too.

He turns to his boyfriend, who is suddenly looking a little guilty. “Hank, who is the Twelve?”

The man shrugs. “I have never heard of them! When he asked me to get you to do this hit, he just said that the big guys were mad at him, and might kill you, Barry, but if you did this one job, they’d—“

Breadcrumbs crosses to the babbling little man and lifts him in the air by the front of his pink polo. Fast. Impressive.

“Who is ‘he’, Hank? You said this job was for one of your Chechen buddies, and I had to do it as a favor for them covering up Moss and all that shit at the temple. But the ‘big guys’, that doesn’t sound like a Chechen buddy.”

Hank is gasping for air again. Ok, really, Barry’s hands are nowhere near his throat at all this time.

“Don’t be mad, Barry!” he pants. “Fuches said—“

“FUCHES?!” Barry shouts, his face three inches from Hank’s. “Fuches?!”

Enough with all the shouting. Villanelle points her gun at the ceiling and fires a few rounds into the plaster. The both turn to look at her, Barry still clutching his boyfriend’s shirt.

“Who the hell is Fuches?” she asks, her voice calm.

* * *

The first thing Eve hears when she arrives at the former bread factory where Barry Block Berkman supposedly lives is the unmistakable sound of gunshots. 

_I’m too late_ , she thinks, panic washing over her like the brilliant LA sunset falling over the city. She races inside, past a woman holding the door to pull in a large array of reusable grocery bags filled to the brim with leafy vegetables. She races up flights of stairs. Apartment 4B is his. Fourth floor. Apartment B.

The door is not open when she gets there. She tries the handle, pulling frantically. She tries again, pushing. Neither works.

 _What the hell_ , she thinks. She knocks.

The door wrenches open, and there he stands: Barry, the man from the photo. He hasa gun hanging loosely by his side. “WHAT?” he yells at her, his eyes popping, his chest heaving.

Eve steps back and stares at him. “Uh,” she says, slowly, “my name is Eve Polastri, and I used to work for—“

“Eve!”

She stops talking. Behind the angry man at the door, Eve sees her. She’s grinning. There is blue crap all over her face. She looks ridiculous.

“You are really here,” Villanelle breathes.

“Oh _damn_ , girl,” a man squeals from inside the apartment.

Barry sighs heavily and opens the door for her to come inside. She really shouldn’t. This is a lot of assassins to be hanging out with.

Barry shuts the door and turns the lock behind her. So that’s that.

“You’ve both been hired to kill each other,” Eve begins.

“Duh, Eve,” Villanelle says, sinking down on the hideous couch by the windows. “That’s what we have been talking about. I knew it was too good to be true. Dasha said I would get promotion! Instead I get assassin. Lying bitch.”

Eve has no idea what Villanelle is talking about, but she often doesn’t.

“What’s on your face?” she asks instead.

Villanelle pats the couch beside her. Eve crosses the room slowly and sinks down at the other end, as far from Villanelle as she can get. She still can look at her from the corner of her eye, though. She can look all she wants.

Villanelle pouts and scoots closer to sit next to Eve. She grabs her arm, a deliberate pretense of casualness.

“What do I smell of, Eve?” she asks. Again.

“Clay,” she responds truthfully. “And—are you high?”

Villanelle giggles, leaning back on the couch. She doesn’t let go of Eve’s arm, though. “Only a little.”

“Right,” Barry says, from over by the door, where he and the other guy, whose face is also covered in blue crap, are staring at them. She had forgotten that they were there. “So what should we do about this?”

“Before we get started on coming up with our brilliant plan can we order pizza?” Villanelle asks. “The drugs made me hungry.”

“We’re not ordering—“

“Just order the goddamn pizza, Barry,” Eve commands.

“Get extra cheese!” Villanelle chirps.

Less than an hour later, Villanelle sits in front of her, grinning like an idiot from floor, eating pizza. She and the man with no hair—Hank—have scrubbed their faces clean of the blue mud masks. Eve cannot believe that Hank is really a Chechen gangster. He has on a lot of pink. He winks at her as she reaches for a piece of pizza.

“So, Barry,” Villanelle asks, her mouth full of food, “how is it that you were going to kill me?”

Barry shrugs. “With a gun?”

“I knew it!” she shrieks. “You are so boring.”

“How else was I supposed to do it?”

 _Oh boy_ , Eve thinks. _Here we go._

“A zillion other ways! A razor behind the ear. A tie in the elevator doors. Poison held over the mouth.” She grins, pizza grease all over her lips and teeth. “An axe to the back of the head.”

Eve glares at her.

“That’s such a waste of time,” said Barry. “Not to mention a good way to get caught, being all dramatic. People will start to guess those kills are yours.”

“I want them to know,” Villanelle protests. “I would have made you into an umbrella for your table over there.”

“Jesus,” Barry says. “That’s really fucked up.”

“Okay, guys,” Eve says, before this conversation can escalate to demonstrations. “The point of this is to figure out why you are both being targeted.”

“I need to talk to Fuches,” Barry mumbles. “Then I need to kill Fuches.”

“I have his new phone number,” Hank offers.

“Fuches is Barry’s Konstantin,” Villanelle whispers, leaning forward to say the words into her ear. Eve has to repress a shudder.

“I’ll kill him for you!” Villanelle adds, loudly.

Eve stand up. “No one is killing anyone!”

“Why not?” Hank asks.

But before Eve can answer, she hears a loud cracking sound. She looks up toward the noise, feeling a thin stream of white dust falling into her eyes.

Then she sees nothing at all.

* * *

“Hello, Eve.” Villanelle’s face is inches from hers. They are both laying down, on top of something soft. Her eyes feel heavy.

“This is Barry’s bed,” Villanelle explains. “These American apartments are shit. Can’t even take one little bullet to the plaster. You have a big bruise on your head now.”

Eve grunts. She remembers now. Little streams of white dust. Then big chunks of white ceiling. She tried to sit up, but Villanelle pushes her back down with one hand to the center of her chest.

“Don’t worry, Eve. Don’t get up,” she says, trying for stern and failing. She’s giddy and her hand is sliding a little left of the center of Eve’s chest now. “We fixed everything. Barry is not going to kill me. And I am not going to kill Barry. We are friends now. He’s going to help us take out the Twelve.”

“Us?”

Villanelle grins mischievously, her hand wandering over to Eve’s right breast. “Who else? We make a good team, Kill Commander. You want some pizza? There is one whole pie that didn’t get any ceiling in it.”

Eve nods and throws her head back. Villanelle scampers out of the room.

Her head is pounding. Soon she’s going to have to call Carolyn. Explain this whole mess; clean it up with words and credit card payments and possibly an MRI. The thoughts hurt worse than the injuries do. But she’d be lying if the pain didn’t feel a little bit good.

Villanelle reappears in the doorway, holding the entire pizza box and a whole roll of paper towels. “The plates here are a nightmare; they look like they have salmonella. Boys are really gross.” She smiles a devious half-smile.

Eve can’t help herself. She never can. She smiles at Villanelle, tentatively.

“Ok,” she says. “Let’s take down the Twelve.”

“After the pizza, though,” Villanelle warns.

“Yes,” Eve replies. “Of course. After the pizza.”

**Author's Note:**

> Why does LA look like Williamsburg? Because I’ve never been to LA, that’s why. Anyway, t-minus some hours till this becomes an AU! Enjoy!


End file.
